Government Digital Service: the best startup in Europe we can't invest in

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Saul Klein in the Guardian: “Everyone is rightly excited about the wall of amazing tech-enabled startups being born in Europe and Israel, disrupting massive industries including media, marketing, fashion, retail, travel, finance and transportation. However, there’s one incredibly disruptive startup based in London that is going after one of the biggest markets of all, and is so opaque it is largely unknown in the world of business – and, much to my chagrin, it’s also impossible to invest in.
It’s not a private company, it wasn’t started by “conventional” tech entrepreneurs and the market (though huge) is decidedly unsexy.
Its name is the Government Digital Service (GDS) and it is disrupting the British public sector in an energetic, creative and effective way. In less than two years GDS has hired over 200 staff (including some of the UK’s top digital talent), shipped an award-winning service, and begun the long and arduous journey of completely revolutionising the way that 62 million citizens interact with more than 700 services from 24 government departments and their 331 agencies.
It’s a strange world we live in when the government is pioneering the way that large complex corporations reinvent themselves to not just massively reduce cost and complexity, but to deliver better and more responsive services to their customers and suppliers.
So what is it that GDS knows that every chairman and chief executive of a FTSE100 should know? Open innovation.
1. Open data
• Leads to radical and remarkable transparency like the amazing Transactions Explorer designed by Richard Sargeant and his team. I challenge any FTSE100 to deliver the same by December 2014, or even start to show basic public performance data – if not to the internet, at least to their shareholders and analysts.
• Leads to incredible and unpredictable innovation where public data is shared and brought together in new ways. In fact, the Data.gov.uk project is one of the world’s largest data sources of public data with over 9,000 data sets for anyone to use.
2. Open standards
• Deliver interoperability across devices and suppliers
• Provide freedom from lock-in to any one vendor
• Enable innovation from a level playing field of many companies, including cutting-edge startups
• The Standards Hub from the Cabinet Office is an example of how the government aims to achieve open standards
3. Cloud and open source software and services
• Use of open source, cloud and software-as-a-service solutions radically reduces cost, improves delivery and enables innovation
4. Open procurement
• In March 2011, the UK government set a target to award 25% of spend with third-party suppliers to SMEs by March 2015.”

Index: Measuring Impact with Evidence

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on measuring impact with evidence and was originally published in 2013.

United States

  • Amount per $100 of government spending that is backed by evidence that the money is being spent wisely: less than $1
  • Number of healthcare treatments delivered in the U.S. that lack evidence of effectiveness: more than half
  • How much of total U.S. healthcare expenditure is spent to determine what works: less than 0.1 percent
  • Number of major U.S. federal social programs evaluated since 1990 using randomized experiments and found to have “weak or no positive effects”: 9 out of 10
  • Year the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy was set up to work with federal policymakers to advance evidence-based reforms in major U.S. social programs: 2001
  • Year the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) was introduced by President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB): 2002
    • Out of about 1,000 programs assessed, number found to be effective in 2008: 19%
    • Percentage of programs that could not be assessed due to insufficient data: 17%
    • Amount spent on the Even Start Family Literacy Program, rated ineffective by PART, over the life of the Bush administration: more than $1 billion
  •  Year Washington State legislature began using Washington State Institute for Public Policy’s estimates on how “a portfolio of evidence-based and economically sound programs . . . could affect the state’s crime rate, the need to build more prisons, and total criminal-justice spending”: 2007
    • Amount invested by legislature in these programs: $48 million
    • Amount saved by the legislature: $250 million
  • Number of U.S. States in a pilot group working to adapt The Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative, based on the Washington State model, to make performance-based policy decisions: 14
  • Net savings in health care expenditure by using the Transitional Care Model, which meets the Congressionally-based Top Tier Evidence Standard: $4,000 per patient
  • Number of states that conducted “at least some studies that evaluated multiple program or policy options for making smarter investments of public dollars” between 2008-2011: 29
  • Number of states that reported that their cost-benefit analysis influenced policy decisions or debate: 36
  • Date the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum proposing new evaluations and advising agencies to include details on determining effectiveness of their programs, link disbursement to evidence, and support evidence-based initiatives: 2007
  • Percentage increase in resources for innovation funds that use a tiered model for evidence, according to the President’s FY14 budget: 44% increase
  • Amount President Obama proposed in his FY 2013 budget to allocate in existing funding to Performance Partnerships “in which states and localities would be given the flexibility to propose better ways to combine federal resources in exchange for greater accountability for results”:  $200 million
  • Amount of U.S. federal program funding that Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman suggests be directed towards evaluations of outcomes: 1%
  • Amount of funding the City of New York has committed for evidence-based research and development initiatives through its Center for Economic Opportunity: $100 million a year

Internationally

  • How many of the 30 OECD countries in 2005-6 have a formal requirement by law that the benefits of regulation justify the costs: half
    • Number of 30 OECD member countries in 2008 that reported quantifying benefits to regulations: 16
    • Those who reported quantifying costs: 24
  • How many members make up the Alliance for Useful Evidence, a network that “champion[s]  evidence, the opening up of government data for interrogation and use, alongside the sophistication in research methods and their applications”: over 1,000
  • Date the UK government, the ESRC and the Big Lottery Fund announced plans to create a network of ‘What Works’ evidence centres: March 2013
  • Core funding for the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth: £1m p.a. over an initial three year term
  • How many SOLACE Summit members in 2012 were “very satisfied” with how Research and Intelligence resources support evidence-based decision-making: 4%
    • Number of areas they identified for improving evidence-based decision-making: 5
    • Evaluation of the impact of past decisions: 46% of respondents
    • Benchmarking data with other areas: 39%
    • assessment of options available: 33% 
    • how evidence is presented: 29% 
    • Feedback on public engagement and consultation: 25%
  •  Number of areas for improvement for Research and Intelligence staff development identified at the SOLACE Summit: 6
    • Strengthening customer insight and data analysis: 49%
    • Impact evaluation: 48%
    • Strategic/corporate thinking/awareness: 48%
    • Political acumen: 46%
    • Raising profile/reputation of the council for evidence-based decisions: 37%
    • Guidance/mentoring on use of research for other officers: 25%

Sources

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of smart disclosure was originally published in 2013.

While much attention is paid to open data, data transparency need not be managed by a simple On/Off switch: It’s often desirable to make specific data available to the public or individuals in targeted ways. A prime example is the use of government data in Smart Disclosure, which provides consumers with data they need to make difficult marketplace choices in health care, financial services, and other important areas. Governments collect two kinds of data that can be used for Smart Disclosure: First, governments collect information on services of high interest to consumers, and are increasingly releasing this kind of data to the public. In the United States, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services collects and releases online data on health insurance options, while the Department of Education helps consumers understand the true cost (after financial aid) of different colleges. Second, state, local, or national governments hold information on consumers themselves that can be useful to them. In the U.S., for example, the Blue Button program was launched to help veterans easily access their own medical records.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy. Progress Report. Consumer Empowerment Strategy. United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills, December 2012. http://bit.ly/17MqnL3.

  • The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.
  • The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.
Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.
  • This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.
  • Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

Brodi, Elisa. “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2012. http://bit.ly/17hssEK.

  • This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.
  • The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”
National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.
    • This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.
  • In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

“Policies in Practice: The Download Capability.” Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement, August 2010. http://bit.ly/HhMJyc.

  • This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”
  • To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
    • Make the download capability a common practice
    • Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
    • Collaborate on sample data sets
    • Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
    • Include the download capability in procurement requirements.
  • The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
    • Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
    • Patients need and want the information
    • The download capability would encourage innovation
    • A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
    • A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.
Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.
  • This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.
  • Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

Thaler, Richard H., and Will Tucker. “Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.” Harvard Business Review January – February 2013. The Big Idea. http://bit.ly/18gimxw.

  • In this article, Thaler and Tucker make three key observations regarding the challenges related to smart disclosure:
    • “We are constantly confronted with information that is highly important but extremely hard to navigate or understand.”
    • “Repeated attempts to improve disclosure, including efforts to translate complex contracts into “plain English,” have met with only modest success.”
    • “There is a fundamental difficulty of explaining anything complex in simple terms. Most people find it difficult to write instructions explaining how to tie a pair of shoelaces.

Social movements and their technologies. wiring social change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stefania Milan: “Social Movements and Their Technologies. Wiring Social Change explores the interplay between social movements and their “liberated technologies”. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects (“emancipatory communication practices”) as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past 15 years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots….
Read an excerpt from the book
“The question of infrastructure might sound trivial in times of abundance of “free” social media, microblogging platforms and apps allowing people to voice their opinions and share pictures and videos at will, and at virtually no cost. But we often forget that these platforms are owned and controlled by media and telecoms corporations whose agenda focuses on profit and corporate interests rather than participation, empowerment, and social justice. With this in mind, in recent decades activist groups have increasingly challenged media corporations and state-owned broadcasters on their own terrain. They have created alternatives to existing communication infrastructure by setting up community radio and television stations, and alternative websites for self-produced information. Such grassroots media have allowed broader swathes of the citizenry to access media production and secure communication channels. They have become what DeeDee Halleck calls “infrastructures of resistance” (2002, p. 191) to the neoliberal order in the media realm.”

DataViva: a Big Data Engine for the Brazilian Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Piece by André Victor dos Santos Barrence and Cesar A. Hidalgo: “The current Internet paradigm in which one can search about anything and retrieve information is absolutely empowering. We can browse files, websites and indexes and effortlessly reach good amount of information. Google, for instance, was explicitly built on a library analogy available to everyone. However, it is a world where information that should be easily accessible is still hidden in unfriendly databases, and that the best-case scenario is finding few snippets of information embedded within the paragraphs of a report. But is this the way it should be? Or is this just the world we are presently stuck with?
The last decade has been particularly marked by an increasing hype on big data and analytics, mainly fueled by those who are interested in writing narratives on the topic but not necessarily coding about it, even when data itself is not the problem.
Let’s take the case of governments. Governments have plenty of data and in many cases it is actually public (at least in principle). Governments “know” how many people work in every occupation, in every industry and in every location; they know their salaries, previous employers and education history. From a pure data perspective all that is embedded in tax, social security records or annual registrations. From a more pragmatic perspective, it is still inaccessible and hidden even when it is legally open the public. We live in a world where the data is there, but where the statistics and information are not.
The state government of Minas Gerais in Brazil (3rd economy the country, territory larger than France and 20 millions inhabitants) made an important step in that direction by releasing DataViva.info, a platform that opens data for exports and occupations for the entire formal sector of the Brazilian economy through more than 700 million interactive visualizations. Instead of poorly designed tables and interfaces, it guides users to answer questions or freely discover locations, industries and occupations in Brazil that are of interest to them. DataViva allows users to explore simple questions such as the evolution of exports in the last decade for each of the 5,567 municipalities in the country, or highly specific queries, for instance, the average salaries paid to computer scientists working in the software development industry in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas.
DataViva’s visualizations are built on the idea that the industrial and economic activity development of locations is highly path dependent. This means that locations are more likely to be successful at developing industries and activities that are related to the ones already existing, since it indicates the existence of labor inputs, and other capabilities, that are specific and that can often be redeployed to a few related industries and activities. Thus, it informs the processes by which opportunities can be explored and prospective pathways for greater prosperity.
The idea that information is key for the functioning of economies is at least as old as Friedrich Hayek’s seminal paper The Use of Knowledge in Society from 1945. According to Hayek, prices help coordinate economic activities by providing information about the wants and needs of goods and services. Yet, the price information can only serve as a signal as long as people know those prices. Maybe the salaries for engineers in the municipality of Betim (Minas Gerais) are excellent and indicate a strong need for them? But who would have known how many engineers are there in Betim and what are their average salaries?
But the remaining question is: why is Minas Gerais making all of this public data easily available? More than resorting to the contemporary argument of open government Minas understands this is extremely valuable information for investors searching for business opportunities, entrepreneurs pursuing new ventures or workers looking for better career prospects. Lastly, the ultimate goal of DataViva is to provide a common ground for open discussions, moving away from the information deprived idea of central planning and into a future where collaborative planning might become the norm. It is a highly creative attempt to renew public governance for the 21st century.
Despite being a relatively unknown state outside of Brazil, by releasing a platform as DataViva, Minas is providing a strong signal about where in world governments are really pushing forward innovation rather than simply admiring and copying solutions that used to come from trendsetters in the developed world. It seems like real innovation isn’t necessarily taking place in Washington, Paris or London anymore.”
 

'Fix-It Squads': prototyping a way to better work with business in fixing problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DesignGov (AU): “Can you really understand a problem if you have no experience with it? And can you really fix a problem if you don’t understand it?
The public sector plays a key role in the business environment, and sometimes that includes the generation and the resolution of problems faced by businesses. Our research as part of the business and government interactions project suggests that when businesses face issues that relate to multiple government agencies and/or multiple jurisdictions, it can be difficult for them to convey their experience. A problem that is very real for them can seem distributed and minor to the parts of the public sector that are connected with it. It is also difficult for public servants to get across the ‘whole’ of the problem and what can be done about it, when the solution may require coordination across agencies and where it may be hard to prioritise competing issues.
Through the ‘Fix-It Squads’ concept, we’re investigating how problem resolution processes might be improved:

  • To give public servants the opportunity to become immersed in the problem at hand and to share in the lived experience of it
  • To give businesses the opportunity to explain and show the problem as they experience it, rather than in the terms of public sector agencies (who might be contributing to the problem).

We are seeking your help and participation in prototyping. This post gives a quick overview of the ‘Fix-It Squads’ concept, asks for your help with the prototyping, and provides an expanded explanation of what Fix-It Squads might involve and why something like them are needed (in addition to the description provided in the Lost in Translation report and the associated prototyping prospectus).
FixIt Squads Synopsis
 

New business models for open data in the digital economy: a preliminary assessment of the literature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference paper by Bonina, Carla M. and Elaluf-Calderwood, Silvia: “There is increasing excitement about the potential economic and social benefits of using newly released data in open access format (open data). For the government, open data offers potential for improving public service delivery, transparency and efficiency of operations. Open data bring also promising opportunities to generate innovation and economic growth in the economy. By releasing open data, individuals and companies will build new products and services that can feed back into the economy and promote economic growth. Despite recent advances on the matter, the business models that may help extracting the potential value of open data are not well understood. In this research in progress, we review possible directions in the literature to address in what ways open data may be a source for new business and innovation, as well as what challenges and potential barriers emerge on its take up.”

What do you know?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article in the Financial Times by Eric Openshaw John Hagel: “Talent holds the key to company performance. From business units to Finance to IT, getting the right skills to the right place at the right time is a constant challenge. Now consider that workplace technologies are becoming obsolete faster, and the useful life of many skills is shorter. Workers at all levels need to be able to learn and relearn rapidly to adapt to and anticipate changing demands. Recruitment and retention initiatives can’t address the need, nor can standardised training programs and knowledge management.
New technologies offer an opportunity to rethink both talent development and traditional knowledge management and integrate learning directly into the daily work experience. Virtual platforms enable workers to connect with each other to solve problems across distributed work settings and beyond organisational boundaries.
The preponderance of sensors and advanced analytics today make it more possible than ever to collect and share individual’s real-time performance in a variety of settings. Sensors and the integration of social platforms into work allows for knowledge and experiences to be captured automatically, as they occur, rather than depending on compliance and coerced participation to populate reputation profiles and knowledge management databases. These technologies support rich, context-specific learning and participation driven by momentum as users discover and create value.
Training programs and knowledge management have a place, but they may not deliver the skilled workers needed to the right place and time in a rapidly changing environment. Pre-developed content quickly becomes obsolete or lacks the context to make it relevant to the individual. Perhaps more importantly, classroom training and knowledge databases tend to focus on the commonalities between work, the standard processes and practices, when in fact workers spend most of their days dealing with the exceptions that don’t fit into the standard processes and systems, whether it’s a one-off shipping request or a customer who can’t make your software work with their hardware. Workers typically get better at handling the non-standard aspects of their work through on-the-job experience…

In a recent paper, we detailed nine principles that help to create the type of environment that fosters learning and improvement. The following three principles demonstrate how technology can play an important role in enabling this on-the-job learning and in amplifying the learning, especially across a virtual workforce.

Real-time feedback for individuals and teams. For workers to improve performance and learn what works or doesn’t work, they need to have a context-specific understanding of what is expected and how they are doing relative to others, in the moment rather than three- or six-months down the line.
At virtual call-centre LiveOps, the independent agents see customer and program-specific metrics on an online dashboard. These metrics define the level of performance necessary for agents to remain eligible to take calls for a program and are continuously updated, providing real-time feedback after each call so that agents can see how they are doing relative to their peer group and where they can improve. This level of performance data transparency creates a meritocracy, as agents are compared to their peers and rewarded based on their relative performance.
Smart capture and share. In any work setting, a great deal of information is generated and exchanged in meetings, conversations, instant messages, and email. Easy access to that information helps foster collaboration, solve problems, and improve business processes. At SAP Community Network (SCN), intelligent cataloguing of insights from discussion forums, tagged for searchability, helps make the right information available at the right time to those who need it without requiring the burdensome documentation associated with typical knowledge management. Other users can search for solutions in the context of the original problem posed, as well as through related discussions that may have led to an ultimate solution. Instead of days of internal debate or experimentation, the typical time to receive a response is 17 minutes.
Helping workers make relevant connections. In a typical organisation, physical or virtual, it can be difficult to know who everyone is and what their experience, expertise, and interests are, and the typical knowledge and resource management tools that require individuals to maintain profiles rarely see the level of continuing compliance and participation to make them useful. Instead, workers tend to fall back on relationships. They seek help and learn from those already known to them.
Now, virtual platforms, such as the one used by Odesk, a global online workplace, automatically generate detailed, up-to-date profiles. These profiles include the contractor’s cumulative and historical ratings and hourly wages for each completed project as well as the scores for any tests or certifications. The same type of automatic, action-based reputation profiles can be used internally to facilitate assessing and connecting with the right co-workers for the job at hand…”

How to Start Thinking Like a Data Scientist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas C. Redman in Harvard Business Review Blog: “Slowly but steadily, data are forcing their way into every nook and cranny of every industry, company, and job. Managers who aren’t data savvy, who can’t conduct basic analyses, interpret more complex ones, and interact with data scientists are already at a disadvantage. Companies without a large and growing cadre of data-savvy managers are similarly disadvantaged.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or a Bayesian statistician to tease useful insights from data. This post explores an exercise I’ve used for 20 years to help those with an open mind (and a pencil, paper, and calculator) get started. One post won’t make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative.
While the exercise is very much a how-to, each step also illustrates an important concept in analytics — from understanding variation to visualization.
First, start with something that interests, even bothers, you at work, like consistently late-starting meetings. Whatever it is, form it up as a question and write it down: “Meetings always seem to start late. Is that really true?”
Next, think through the data that can help answer your question, and develop a plan for creating them. Write down all the relevant definitions and your protocol for collecting the data. For this particular example, you have to define when the meeting actually begins. Is it the time someone says, “Ok, let’s begin.”? Or the time the real business of the meeting starts? Does kibitzing count?
Now collect the data. It is critical that you trust the data. And, as you go, you’re almost certain to find gaps in data collection. You may find that even though a meeting has started, it starts anew when a more senior person joins in. Modify your definition and protocol as you go along.
Sooner than you think, you’ll be ready to start drawing some pictures. Good pictures make it easier for you to both understand the data and communicate main points to others. There are plenty of good tools to help, but I like to draw my first picture by hand. My go-to plot is a time-series plot, where the horizontal axis has the date and time and the vertical axis has the variable of interest. Thus, a point on the graph below (click for a larger image) is the date and time of a meeting versus the number of minutes late….”

Digital Government @ Work: A Social Informatics Perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Chi Onwurah: “In the 1990s and 2000s, tech cynics would often quote Robert Solow’s 1987 quip, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Now that value chains have been disintermediated and dependent business models trashed, it is less common to hear that. However it would still be appropriate to say ‘You can see the digital age everywhere but in Government.’ Certainly in a recent Policy Exchange report, the Prime Minister’s former digital advisor Rohan Silva did his best to portray the public sector as a digitally backward captured client of ICT oligarchs now being reluctantly dragged into the 21st Century.That makes the timing of Digital Government @ Work by Ian McLoughlin, Rob Wilson, and Mike Martin all the more fortuitous. The book seeks to give the reader a broad evidence-based understanding of what digital Government can be, what it is, and the challenges it faces. It is largely successful. Steve Halliday, President of Society of Information Technology Management describes the book as ‘a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis of the history and the future of digital government,’ and I would agree with that analysis. Despite lengthy definitional discussions and dense referencing, the book is also very readable and what is more, should be read….
The social informatics perspective of the book means its outlook is neither entirely technology-driven – whatever the problem the right system can solve it – nor purely qualitative, but combines understanding of the technology and its social and organisational impact with an analysis of the interdependencies at play in the context of public service delivery. These are illustrated by detailed case studies from  Children’s Services, the National Programme for Local e-Government (FAME) and telecare, which highlight failings in current approaches to what they call ‘technology enactment’ as well as the – possibly systemic – challenges to real organisational and service innovation….
Most important is the recognition that technology only empowers when we feel ownership of it, not controlled by it. If digital government is to be about empowering and improving that critical relationship at the frontline, then the ‘street bureaucrats’ the book refers to, as well as the citizen-user and the IT manager, must all be involved in an on-going co-production of the service. Rather than traditional integration we must ‘seek alternative means of coordination such as through federation and federability.’ If this is achieved, we may look to ‘digital government maturity characterised by partnership working across a mixed economy of public, private and third sectors and supported by an infrastructure of federated information and identity management systems and shared service environments’….”